Tag: Foreigners

That’s More Like It

Disaster, Mocking Furriners

When even the normally-docile Germans start rioting against the lockdown nonsense, you know things are getting out of hand:

Today saw a demonstration involving hundreds of people, and chants of “Wir sind das Volk!” [“We are the people!”] and “Freiheit!” [“Freedom!”] could be heard.
Law enforcement attended the scene to disband crowds, with officers reportedly having to detain people and deploy pepper spray.
Pictures showed lines of police with riot shields clashing with angry-looking protesters as well as people being dragged away in handcuffs.

If the Kraut cops need some reinforcements, we could always send them the dreaded Meal Team Six from Ector County:

Those old boys could use the exercise.

No Business Sense

Business, Marketing / Advertising

Here’s a situation which left me scratching my head:

The managing director of a plant wholesaler said his firm has lost more than £2.5million-worth of business in the last three months after garden centres were forced to close as part of the coronavirus lockdown.  Adrian Marskell, who runs The Bransford Webbs Plant Company in Worcester, in the West Midlands, has had to begin throwing away around 100,000 flowering plants which cannot be sold.  Shocking photos show mountains of de-potted plants waiting to be composted, with others sitting in colourful rows, all destined to be thrown away.

I would have done something a little different.

Why not load up the plants in the back of a truck, then drive around all the residential streets in Worcester, depositing two or three plants at a time in front of houses, with a note attached:

“Rather than toss all these lovely plants in the skip, we’d rather they found a good home in your garden instead.  Please accept them with our compliments, and we hope to see you all when the lockdown comes to an end.”
— Bransford Webbs Plant Company

And come tax filing time, I’d write off the cost of the plants as an advertising expense.

No doubt, this being Britishland, there’s some law against doing all that.

Racial Preferences

Business, Two-Minute Hate

My first job as a teenager was as a computer operator at a large corporation, part of an expansion of the IT department’s mainframe system.  There was one other White male operator, and an Indian guy was the department supervisor.   As more operators were hired, all were Indians (coincidentally, all from the supervisor’s home city in India).

Within six months, I and the other White operator had been replaced by two Indians.

Several years ago, I knew a highly-respected senior executive at a huge multinational corporation who once attended a meeting with the IT department.  This having happened when globalism was all the rage, it will come as no surprise that almost all the people in the meeting were Indian men — and not one of them second-generation American, either:  all were recent immigrants.

Anyway, as the meeting went on, the language increasingly turned into Hindi — this in a company which insisted on English as its global language in all correspondence and conversation — and when my friend insisted that everyone speak English, the atmosphere turned hostile.  “But we understand each other better in our native language!” was the protest, whereupon my friend, not known for her tact, said, “Then you should have stayed in India, where everyone understands your home language.  Unfortunately for you, we’re in America, this is an American company, and our corporate language is English.”

Half an hour after the meeting’s conclusion, she was summoned to H.R., officially reprimanded for “cultural insensitivity”, and told to watch herself in future.

So she filed a formal complaint against H.R. for not enforcing corporate policy and (deliciously) adding that one of the men had referred to her as a “stupid bitch” during the meeting — unfortunately for him, one of the few Hindi expressions she understood — and she filed a complaint against him for sexual harassment.  He was “reassigned” to another division a week later, and the H.R. flunky was also officially reprimanded, by Legal this time.

It didn’t matter, though;  over time, the entire IT department became staffed by Indians, all H-1B visa holders.

It is a little-known fact of corporate life — not just here in the U.S., but in Britain as well, that unless checked, Indians will always hire other Indians, and if they can, they’ll displace non-Indians in order to do so.

And this is why I understand exactly what is going on in this little situation:

An Indian-run outsourcing company used Congress’s H-1B visa-worker program to systematically discriminate against American college graduates, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in New Jersey.
The company, named Wipro, “operates under a general policy of discrimination in favor of [imported] South Asians and against [American] individuals who are not South Asian and not Indian,” says the lawsuit, which was filed in New Jersey.
…
U.S. executives strongly favor outsourcing because it makes work easier for CEOs and H.R. managers, the Americans say to Breitbart News. The Indian workforces are easy to hire and fire, they don’t complain to managers, they do not make professional arguments against executives’ decisions, and they allow kickbacks via India or ancillary U.S. businesses, the Americans say.

Lovely, isn’t it?

I hope that this open secret gets whacked, and fast — and if it does, at least one good thing will have emerged from the Chinkvirus pandemic, as the massive job losses we’ve sustained have brought practices such as these to everyone’s attention.

And don’t let anyone get sidetracked into thinking that this comes from racial animus against Indians — because it’s the exact opposite:  Indians are discriminating against Whites, and as much as they might claim that this is all in the service of the great god “Cost-Cutting”, they’re lying.  It’s a way to get Indians hired, and a way to get tech expertise back to India.  (If you think I’m exaggerating, please prove me wrong by showing me the statistics proving that a large majority of Indian H-1Bs do not return to India, and go on to become U.S. citizens.  Good luck with that.)  It’s absolutely no different from the ChiComs infiltrating U.S. universities and taking expertise out of the country and back to China.

I hope that Wipro gets sued out of existence.

Stupid People

Disaster, Media Assholes

One of the most unattractive things that has come out of the Chinkvirus pandemic has been the social shaming of people who, in the opinions of some, are ignoring the dangers of the virus’s spread.  Brits have coined a term “covidiots” to describe these people, hence (link in pic):

Well of course they would be fearful, because — and let’s be under no illusions about this —  when it comes to viral infection, only two things matter:  dosage (the actual number of viruses inhaled or ingested) and its subset, dispersion.

Most studies on infection take place in a closed room of about 400 sq.ft. (20′ x 20′).  Now take that outside (especially on a breezy day), and the dosage will be immediately reduced to an enormous degree because the wind not only disperses the virus-laden particles, but can even blow them apart, reducing their danger exponentially.  It’s why the Nazis went to all the trouble of building gas chambers at Auschwitz, instead of just spraying Zyklon-B on the hapless Jews out in the fields.

So to return to the above hysteria:  of course a majority of people are going to be apprehensive about going back to the office — it’s a closed environment, you idiots, and viral infection is definitely a possibility.  But out in the open air?

Nada, zip, zilch — as long as people keep some distance between themselves and strangers so that the open air can work its magic.  And don’t touch railings and other surfaces that others have touched without cleaning your hands with disinfectant wipes immediately afterwards.

And as for those idiot cops who keep harassing sunbathers, surfers and the like:  the cops should be tied to lampposts and hosed down with icy water (lest they get viral infections by getting too close to the people they’re harassing), e.g.:

And those moron journalists [redundancy alert]  who perpetuate this foolishness deserve the same treatment.

Asking The Other Side

Behind Enemy Lines, Elections, Mocking Furriners

Over at Instapundit, Gail Heriot has posted a decent summary of the England-Scotland alliance.  But then there’s this:

In 1979, an effort to establish (or re-establish) a separate Scottish legislature via referendum failed. It did so, however, only because the Act authorizing the referendum required that at least 40% of the entire Scottish electorate vote in favor. While the referendum got more yes than no votes, turnout was poor. In 1997, another such referendum was held. This time it passed, a Scottish Parliament was established, and the process of “devolution” was begun.
In 2014, when an independence referendum was held, it came a lot closer to passing than union supporters would have preferred. Ultimately, Scottish voters went 55.3% to 44.7% in favor of sticking it out with England.

What interests me, and many others, is the fact that only the Scots  voted on whether to leave or stay in the Union, which begs the question:  why did not all  interested parties — including the English and Welsh — vote on separation?

Had the population living south of the River Tweed voted, you bet there’s have been considerable support behind a “Toss the Jocks” movement — Mr Free Market and The Englishman claim that at least two-thirds of English voters would support expelling the porridge-monkeys in a heartbeat, had they been allowed to do so.

Such ravings should be taken with a grain of salt — especially when expressions like “Can we then finish what we started at Culloden?” and “Rebuild Hadrian’s Wall” are thrown into the mix.  Nevertheless, we Murkins should not underestimate the depth of enmity that still exists between the Picts and the Angles even after all this time.  It’s most openly expressed by the Scots, such as when supporting anyone playing England in sporting competitions, but the anti-Jock sentiments in England, while less overt, still run pretty deep.

We can talk about the Welsh and Irish situations on another occasion;  but in the meantime, think of the situation as a (very) civilized Balkans, and you’ll get the idea.

Keine Fahrvergnügen

Drive Time

In a world which is becoming more and more “convenient” (i.e. controlled by electronics and algorithms), I have to say that in the automotive world, it’s the Germans who (unsurprisingly) lead the charge.

Read this Road & Track article about the Porsche Cayenne SUV, and see if you can spot the parts which made my trigger-finger itch and led me to look up “home-made explosives” on the Internet.  No, don’t bother;  here they are:

When we ordered our Cayenne, we thought the $940 stand-alone option price was a bit excessive. Our opinion on the cost has not changed, and while we have only just gotten used to pulling the key out to unlock the car, then returning said key to our pocket before starting the car—you don’t need to insert the key to start the car—we do find it a bit annoying to have one but not the other, considering our Cayenne is $80K. Staff editor Eric Stafford captured it perfectly in the logbook: “This first-world problem is a first-world pain in the ass.”
Driving at night on back roads has brought to light (sorry) the inability to dim the instrument cluster sufficiently. On a dark road, the interior lights glare into our eyes. Not only that, dimming the lights requires you to go through a menu in the infotainment system, and there are three separate dimmer controls for the instrument cluster, clock on the dash, and center touchscreen. Remember dimmer knobs? Porsche says forget them; doing it through an infotainment menu that can’t be adjusted while moving is a much better solution. This is a prime example of technology taking a simple task and making it unnecessarily complicated.

I have already voiced my loathing for keyless access/ignition systems, so I won’t go into it here.  Not having an analog dimmer switch for the interior gauge lighting is so fucking stupid as to defy definition.  (My late father always used to say, when some or other non-essential doodad on his Mercedes 350 SE failed, “No wonder they lost the fucking war!”)

I am going out on a not-so-long limb here, and offer 10-1 odds that among the performance car manufacturers, Porsche will be the first to offer / mandate driverless (a.k.a. self-driving) cars, most likely in their SUVs first, and then the venerable 911 line soon thereafter.   (It was bad enough that they took the manual gearbox out of the 911 line altogether — because no driver can shift gears quicker than their phantastiches  PDK —  and more nonsense like that is bound to follow.)

I am not, and probably will never be in the market for a new Porsche of any description, so they can safely ignore my bitching.  (Honorable mention:  the Porsche Cayman, which has a stick shift and is routinely described as one of the best sports cars — in its original sense — on the market.)

And even that interior is a little too gadgety for Your Humble Narrator.

But it’s not just Porsche;  I am going to eschew any  model car whose manufacturer deigns to make driving decisions on my behalf.

When I talk tongue-in-cheek about wanting a basic car like the Mini-Moke or Toyota FJ40, I don’t really mean it because even I have  my limits.  Not all  innovation sucks, in other words;  but I would suggest that “Remember dimmer knobs? Porsche says forget them; doing it through an infotainment menu that can’t be adjusted while moving is a much better solution”  should require daily floggings for the engineers who suggested this and the managers who signed off on it.

And if for some insane reason I did  want a non-Boxster Porsche, it would be this one:

Yup, the 356c pushes all my sports-car buttons, Porscherly-speaking.  Now  we’re talking driving pleasure, my friends — and yes, I’ve been behind the wheel of a 356 before, and it was a fantastic experience.